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Saturday, September 20, 2014

Once Upon a Time

I read my friend Jeffrey
Alexander’s newest book, Obama Power, in one rainy Sunday afternoon on Cape Cod. It
asserts that although Obama was written off by pundits as a one-term wonder
following the Democratic congressional losses of 2010, he won re-election two
years later -- by using story-telling techniques we’ve known since
humans sat around the fire in caves.

With the State of the Union
Address in 2011, writes Alexander, the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of
Sociology at Yale, Obama created a fictional character and drew a plot line
that ended in, “This is what change looks like.”

Opponent Mitt Romney, on the
other hand, had little difficulty putting points on the board, but he had
problems narrating himself heroically. Prof. Alexander quotes Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for President George H.
W. Bush: “Mr. Romney couldn’t articulate
a way forward, and nobody knew what his presidency would look like.”

Because perception can define
performance, story-telling also has become corporate America’s latest buzzword
for everything from brand marketing to social media to employment resumes.

Persuasion is the core of
commerce. Customers must be sold on a product, employees motivated to buy into a
strategy, investors convinced to trust in a stock. But despite the critical importance of
persuasion, most executives struggle to communicate, let alone to influence and
inspire.

Robert McKee is an
award-winning screenwriter and director. In a classic HarvardBusiness Review
article some years ago, he was quoted as saying:

“There are two ways to persuade people. The first is
by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in.
It's an intellectual process, and in the business world it usually consists of
a PowerPoint slide presentation in which you say, ‘Here is our company's
biggest challenge, and here is what we need to do to prosper.’ And you build
your case by giving statistics and facts and quotes from authorities. But there
are two problems with rhetoric. First, the people you're talking to have their
own set of authorities, statistics, and experiences. While you're trying to
persuade them, they are arguing with you in their heads. Second, if you do
succeed in persuading them, you've done so only on an intellectual basis.
That's not good enough, because people are not inspired to act by reason alone.

The other way to persuade people—and ultimately a much
more powerful way—is by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do
that is by telling a compelling story. In a story, you not only weave a lot of
information into the telling but you also arouse your listener's emotions and
energy. If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story,
then you get people rising to their feet amid thunderous applause instead of
yawning and ignoring you.”

Persuasion is the centerpiece
not only of business activity, but also of much human endeavor. And we’ve
struggled forever about how to do it.

As long ago as the fourth
century B.C., for example, Aristotle was wondering what makes a speech
persuasive. He came up with three principles:ethical appeal, emotional appeal and logical appeal. A
rhetorician strong on all three, he said, was likely to produce a persuaded
audience.